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BMC Public Health is one of those online, open access journals that are becoming more and more prominent in academic publishing. A couple of recent articles throw rather different lights on the communication of health messages to the public. One is pretty positive about how Australian television reported the 2009 swine flu epidemic. The other reports an analysis of school books in Spain, and I'll return to that in another blog entry.

Google seems to be doing pretty well everything these days. Their UK operation has just published the first issue of a new magazine, Think Quarterly, and it's all about data. It looks very pleasant, particularly if you read the version that emulates a print magazine. And there's some interesting content, including interviews with Hans Rosling and with Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist who famously said in 2009 that "the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians." But, strangely, the whole magazine says nothing explicit about uncertainty.

Philip Tetlock, an academic psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, is famous in forecasting circles for his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? He reported on a 20-year research project on expert forecasts in many different fields, and, to summarize crudely, found that most of the experts were pretty hopeless at forecasting. Now he's involved in another project to try to do something about this.

The respected and influential Cochrane Collaboration has just published a systematic review of research on different ways of presenting risks and reductions in risk in a health context. It won't come as a surprise to regular readers of this website that they concluded that some aspects of the presentation really do make a difference. But maybe there are a few surprises in their detailed findings.

Did an article in the Times [paywall] today on the forthcoming EU Court of Justice ruling on whether gender can be taken into account when setting insurance premiums. I think this is an important and interesting topic, but articles in the financial pages have been very dull and so tried to make this a bit lighter in tone. Text of article is here.

Are we all drowning in a deluge of data? Are our data tools and systems managing to keep up with all the numbers we're collecting all the time? A series of articles in the journal Science doesn't give an entirely positive view, at least in terms of what's going on in the scientific research community. But what does that have to do with uncertainty?